Big on Data

George Anadiotis

George Anadiotis covers data analytics and related topics for ZDNet. George has been active in IT since 1992 and has had the chance to wear lots of hats and juggle lots of balls during this time. This includes working as an analyst with Gigaom, serving Fortune 500, startups and NGOs as a consultant, building & managing projects, products & teams of all sizes & shapes, and getting involved in award-winning research.

Andrew Brust

Andrew Brust has worked in the software industry for 25 years as a developer, consultant, entrepreneur and CTO, specializing in application development, databases and business intelligence technology. He has been a developer magazine columnist and conference speaker since the mid-90s, and a technology book writer and blogger since 2005. Andrew serves as Senior Director, Technical Product Marketing and Evangelism at Datameer, a big data analytics company.

Tony Baer (Ovum)

Tony Baer leads Ovum's Big Data research area. Over his 25 years in the industry, he has studied issues of data integration, software and data architecture, middleware, and application development. Having tracked the emergence of BI and data warehousing back in the 1990s, Baer sees similar parallels emerging in the world of Big Data today. His coverage focuses on how Big Data must become a first-class citizen in the data center, IT organization, and the business.
Baer has a multi-disciplinary background touching the different tiers of enterprise software. His expertise in data management is complemented by deep background in software development platforms and middleware. Prior to joining Ovum, he was an independent analyst whose company onStrategies delivered market assessments and messaging advisory services to vendor clients. He co-authored some of the earliest books on the Java and .NET frameworks including Understanding the .NET Framework and J2EE Technology in Practice. He has spoken at numerous industry events covering data management, and has been chronicling the industry in his blog for over 15 years. His career began as a journalist with publications including Computerworld, Application Development Trends, Computergram, Software Magazine, Information Week, and Manufacturing Business Technology.

Microsoft and Boeing are each leaders in their field; they're also neighbors on the east side of Seattle. Here's how these two peas in a pod are using Azure data technologies to make commercial flights more efficient and even (gasp!) more pleasant.

Last week Mesosphere announced a number of strategic partnerships that comprise a comprehensive ecosystem and spearhead its initiative for what it calls Container 2.0. We take a look at what this means for the industry.

Developing IoT projects is complex, partly due to its fluid state, partly due to the many hardware and software moving parts, and partly because of everything that comes with app development. Seebo promises to ease this process by throwing some smart tech in the mix.

With the 2.0 release, the open-source Apache Spark compute engine has entered adolescence. It has consolidated several APIs in the name of simplification, while adding a few for promoting extensibility and improved performance. And by eroding the wall between real-time and batch, it could push streaming into the core of analytics applications.

The release of DataStax 5.0 provides a good snapshot on how the database market has evolved over the past decade. DataStax, the company that offers a commercial version of the open-source Apache Cassandra database, has spread its wings in the new release.

RDBMS-on-Hadoop database Splice Machine onboards Apache Spark and goes open source. Is it trying to be all things to all people, or is it just combining a set of raw technologies and making them useful and readily available?

Hortonworks is looking a lot more like its rivals, Cloudera and MapR, in offering content that is vendor-specific. That's a good thing, especially if you're a customer looking to implement a data lake -- and seeking assurance that your vendor has a sustainable business model.